1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a program for assisting generation of a report about a medical image.
2. Description of the Related Art
In imaging diagnosis, a medical staff, such as a diagnostician, observes medical images to carry out diagnosis and writes remarks and reports. In order to streamline and speed up operations in medical institutions, digitalization of such reports using computers to replace reports written on sheets of paper is under way. Further, systems have been proposed, which store digitalized reports in a shared server which is accessible from more than one terminals, so that more than one doctors can share the reports and utilize them.
Texts in such reports are often inputted freely, however, writing a report with observing a displayed medical image takes time and trouble. Therefore, a method for reducing burden in generating such reports has been provided (see, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2005-160502). In this method, example sentences describing medical images are associated and stored with information attached to the medical images, such as the type of an imaging apparatus, the region, the time and date of testing and the patient identification information. When a report about a certain medical image is generated, suitable example sentences are automatically selected from these example sentences based on inputted attached information, and characteristics of a lesion contained in the medical image are applied to the selected example sentences. Further, generated example sentences and reports can be edited, and previous reports about the patient can be utilized.
Another problem lies in that, since character strings used to describe a certain case varies depending on the person who inputs the texts (operator), it is difficult to determine which character strings the case is typically represented with. This will result in nonuniform quality of the image interpretation reports. In addition, since the number of specialists who can interpret medical images, such as radiographic images, is not large, it is necessary to improve quality and efficiency of image interpretation in such a field. In order to generate the image interpretation reports with a certain level of uniformity without depending on the diagnostician who interprets the image, or improve quality and efficiency of image interpretation in a field where the number of the specialists is small, it is desired to positively utilize previous cases and previous image interpretation results. Therefore, a system for assisting report generation has been provided (see, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2006-155002). In this system, stored report files are structuralized using tag information for associating attributes of items contained in each report with contents of the report so as to reduce influences of specific character strings used to describe the case, and image interpretation reports to be referenced are searched based on the tag information so that not only reports containing the same character string(s) but also those having matching item attributes and contents are searched out, to allow positive utilization of the previous cases and previous image interpretation results.
In imaging diagnosis carried out in follow-up observations, it is necessary to accurately measure the size of a lesion, such as a suspected cancer or a cancer undergoing a chemical treatment, in current and previous images to determine whether the size of the lesion has increased, decreased or not changed.
At present, the diagnosticians manually measure the size of the lesion in the current and previous images, and calculate a change in the size to write a follow-up observation report. However, measuring the size of the lesion is a delicate work, and is a large burden for the diagnosticians. The diagnosticians typically measure the size of the lesion in the previous image again to ensure accurate diagnosis without trusting a previous result of measurement even if the previous measurement was conducted by themselves.
With the above-described techniques, previous reports can be used to reduce burden in generating a report, however, the size of a lesion, which is important in the follow-up observation, has to be manually measured before inputted, and the burden of the measuring work cannot be reduced.